Irrelevant Tangents

That's awesome! If I ever fail a drug screen, that's what I'm going to tell them, that I lick all of my dollar bills. That, and I eat A LOT of lemon poppy seed muffins.

On a side note, all brothers suck, at least until you both get way older. Then they magically become more tolerable.

 

What was the surprise? Princess Leia and Han?

 

Well Ted, then this is for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L8b1zPE0-Y

 

I guess it was:
"Luke, "I" am your father!"
"Noooo!"

 

The one person who commented on this article in Area Voices is spot on. It is now legal to knowingly lie when giving statements to the po-po and they cannot use it against you. Kinda like drow society, if you can get away with it, it's all good. elvicthr

Officer: Is there anything I should know about if I reach under the seat?

Defendant: No.

Officer: AAAHHHHHH! A RAT TRAP UNDER THE SEAT!!

Defendant: So?


Court strikes down Minnesota law on free speech grounds
The Minnesota Court of Appeals has struck down a state law against making false statements that allege police misconduct.

By: Associated Press,

ST. PAUL — The Minnesota Court of Appeals has struck down a state law against making false statements that allege police misconduct.

In a ruling today, an appeals panel says the law is unconstitutional on free speech grounds. It says that's because the statute “criminalizes knowingly making false statements that allege police misconduct, but not knowingly making false statements to absolve police.”

The 2-1 decision by Appeals Judge David Minge says that's a kind of discrimination that's not allowed under a U.S. Supreme Court decision in an earlier case.

The case involves a woman convicted of falsely claiming a Winona police officer forged her signature to obtain her medical records while investigating her claim she had been assaulted by another person.

 

If thats the case, can Police also make false claims about people for their own gains?

 

Are you setting me up? I thought they already did do that all the time in order to make cases. oke:

Everyone knows that whenever a police makes a drug bust, they get half the money and half the dope.

 

More proof that technology is an evil and should be cast down and these times of technological "advancement" that we live in should only be spoken of in shame or to compare a negative. Technology will be the thing that renders mankind down to a pulpy slurry and restart evolution, the process that has already begun a long time ago. When toddlers start believing that Iphones and Itv's and Icomputers and Idvd's are their natural biological parents, it's long past time for people to stop being ignorant and start realizing what is important and move to bring back a time when things were infinitely better without addictions to gizmos and gadgets.

I never feel more evil than when !@#$ like this intrudes upon my life and reminds me once again of the lost potential of humanity and my forced hypocrisy. Like Carl Panzram, I sometimes wish the world had one neck so I could wrap my hands around it, throttle it out of existence and spare people the affliction of themselves.

I particularly enjoy the apathy of the last sentence in the article, where he pretends it's not an issue and is flippantly facile about it so that he can continue to post bull!@#$ on twitter, facebook, my space, digg and a hundred other "social" networking websites that promote antisocial behavior and isolationism but continue to believe that it's "social". I guess I've always been light years ahead of the curve because I've been antisocial since I was a child and I didn't need no goddamn electronic gewgaws to do it.

I try so very hard not to let this stupidity bother me but I feel that this purposeful dumbing down is offensive.

iMama
My son is mistaking a smartphone for his mother.
By Eric PapePosted Monday, Oct. 4, 2010, at 11:57 AM ET

Around my son's first birthday, I started holding my iPhone up to his ear when my wife called and saying, "It's your mama, Luka. It's your mama." Our boy often made cooing sounds in response to her voice.

And when I snapped photos with the phone, I showed them to Luka in the moment. He responded with giddy joy.

We quickly fell into a ritual in which I played a slide show of the photos and video in the phone as I put him to bed. Along with Luka, his mother appeared most often in the photos. Usually, by the second run-through, he would be asleep. Once in a while, when I nodded off first, I woke up to discover Luka tapping the screen to replay the video.

And then one day, about two months later, my iPhone rang. My wife's name appeared on the screen. Before I responded, Luka called out, "Mama!" I was so surprised—and proud. Evidence of their special bond, right? Soon after, Luka blurted out "Mama" again, while we were all in the living room. But he wasn't facing his mother. He was facing the phone.
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It became clear: Every time Luka spotted my iPhone, he called "Mama!" Could he really be mistaking an iPhone for his mom?

Rich, a tech savvy friend in Philadelphia asked, via an online chat, whether our toddler might believe that his mother is actually inside the phone. Luka has heard her voice emanating from the device and he has seen her reproduced on the screen. Worse, I had spent two months pointing at the phone and saying: "There's Luka and his mama. … There's Mama and Luka." So Luka knows that his mother is in there. Though she isn't the only thing; she's one of the phone's many capabilities. In other words, Mama is just another cool iPhone app.

Not long after, while we were blowing bubbles in our living room, a friend named Mathias pulled out his identical white iPhone to capture the moment. Luka fixed his gaze on Mathias' iPhone: "Mama." Mathias patiently explained that Luka's mother was right behind him. But Luka was certain. "Mama!" he called to the phone.

From then on, any iPhone would do. Luka would spot her on the table: "Mama!" He would climb on furniture and reach anxiously for her: "Mama!" He spied her on the bookcase: "Mama!" He didn't just want to play with "Mama"; he needed his iMama.

Meanwhile, Luka's mother lost her natural maternal title altogether. She became nameless; Luka summoned her with a mere gesture of his hands or a random squeak. Eventually, he gave her a peripheral title: "Mammon," a sort of extension of his iMama. The only time that Luka directed "Mama" at his mother was when she used my phone.

My wife insisted that this didn't bother her. But since we were in Paris, she did ask a French psychologist what was going on. The psychologue explained to her that "Mama," at Luka's stage of language development, is actually a mot-valise, which translates as a "suitcase word." So "Mama"—or offshoot words like "Mammon"—can refer to an iPhone or a person, but it can also refer to actions, like feeding or lifting Luka out of the crib before sunrise. It can be a verb and a noun, meaning that it can be a mother, all things motherly, or even the action of mothering.

And, apparently, it can be those things on an iPhone. I got in touch with Dr. Richard Colman, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who I have known since my own childhood at the dawn of the home computer era, to ask him how Luka might interpret his mother's voice coming out of any phone and especially how he understood the video and photos of her on a smartphone. In an e-mail, Colman explained that Luka's developing brain cannot make sense of the meaning of his mother's disembodied picture, video, or voice. "When Luka says 'mama' in reference to the iPhones, he is basically saying 'I can see mama,' or 'I can hear mama,' or 'that's the device that I see and hear mama on.' Or 'I want to see a picture of mama,' " Dr. Colman wrote. "He's referencing the experience he has had with it, and not just her."

In decades past, I supposed kids might have been confused by old landline phones, cameras, and even 8mm family film or video. But the effect has multiplied many times as these have all been combined into a single, instantaneously accessible object. In the dark analog ages of technology, if you wanted to show your child a photo, you had to take the pictures, drop the roll off for developing, wait, then sit him down with them. By the time the toddler saw the picture, the experience captured in it might feel like the distant past, if he remembered it at all.

Now, by contrast, Luka goes down a slide, I film it, we watch, and then he goes down the slide again. The recording of his memories is intimately intertwined with the experiences that become memories, almost from the start of his life.

My 3-year-old nephew in Seattle offers a window into my boy's future. When I sent a video of Luka to my brother, he immediately video-called us on the computer with his son on his lap. My nephew wanted to see us right away; he gets frustrated watching videos of family on the computer because they don't interact with him. Forget videos; Skype is his "normal."

The results of our own accidental iMama experiment have made be more sparing in my use of the phone. I've stopped narrating the slide shows and videos. When Luka's mother calls, I don't put the phone up to his ear. I store the phone out of sight. I figured the phone's mama-effect would quickly fade without reinforcement. But three months later, the only change is a loss of brand fidelity. When Luka wobbles down a cobblestone street and he sees anyone speaking on a flashy smartphone, he stretches his arms out to them: "Mama!"

Well, I suppose my son must really love his mama if he sees her everywhere.

 

As I've mentioned in other posts, I've been working a second job as a way to earn a little extra money.

This means that Sunday dinners that I've prepped and cooked regularly have now fallen to J.

J and N (my son) now eat while I'm working and I eat when I get home a bit later. (time constraints as N has to be returned to the ex Sunday night).

This last Sunday as J and N were sitting down to eat, N remarked that it was weird not having me there to eat with them. N's 9 and perfectly understands that the extra job is for the greater good. Still, his statement hit home a bit. The sacrifices we make, eh?

The funniest part of all of this is when he remarked to J that it was "that he didn't know she had the cooking in her"!

I think he dodged getting hit by the potato masher! oke:

 

Necro, just for you, buddy...

DnD miniatures has a great Orcus model out. Things about 7" to 8" tall and well detailed. Painted too!. Saw it a few weeks ago at my local game shop. Pricey, yes but damn worth collecting and displaying.

 

Rrrraaawwwwwrrrrrrrrrr!!!! I'm going to order 20 of them and keep them in all in different places around the house!

 

I learned something new and quite clever already today, the word palimony. Wiki's definition...

Palimony is a popular term, not a historical legal term, used to describe the division of financial assets and real property on the termination of a personal, live-in relationship wherein the parties are not legally married. Unlike alimony, which is typically provided for by law, palimony is not guaranteed to unmarried partners. There must be a clear agreement, written or oral, by both partners stipulating the extent of financial sharing and/or support in order for palimony to be granted. Palimony cases are determined in civil court as a contract matter, rather than in family court, as in cases of divorce.

WTF?! If a couple breaks up and they're not married, they are supposed to pay the other?! Pfffftttt. I think not. That's just plain, bald-faced, outright dumb.

Ok, maybe in one instance I can see it being feasible...if an unmarried couple breaks up and they have a child/children between them, but that's it. There aren't any other logical reasons for paying someone you live with/date, unless maybe you turned them into a cripple for life or something way out there.

 

OMFG, this is one seriously crazy video of someone being held in the hollow of god's hands. A guy single fires a 50 caliber round at 100 yards into an iron plate target and it ricochets nearly straight back at him, skipping once off the ground 10 feet in front of him and killing the earmuffs he was wearing, knocking them right off his head. A couple more inches to the right and this video most likely would not have been made for youtube...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABGIJwiGBc

 

The original word was coined during a case with actor Lee Marvin and one of his floozies. The case failed in court.

Lee is one of my favorite actors. He was a jarhead in WWII. A REAL hero, like Jimmy Stewart.